University of Birmingham student Deborah Hermanns describes her experience of being arrested, released without charge and subsequently suspended from university and banned from running in the Birmingham Guild of Students elections

The relationship between students and locals is fraught with long-held mistrust and resentment. Ex-student Jenny Nelson looks at the colourful history of these often segregated communities, and meets some of the student activists who are trying to break out of the ghettos they've inherited

With 'top-up' fees and increasing debt leaving many students less willing to fight for anyone but themselves, London School of Economics union president Aled Fisher argues for more, not less, participation in wider politics

In trying to push through a reform package that the Guardian has called a 'Blairite revolution', the National Union of Students' Labour leadership is putting the NUS on a path to self-destruction, says executive member Hind Hassan

The ambition of advanced capitalism is not simply to combat radical ideas - it is to abolish the very notion that there could be a serious alternative to the present. Terry Eagleton laments the passing of a critical age